Hail
Amanda Cather, Waltham Fields Community Farm, July 7, 2008
Last Wednesday morning, we were working all three tractors out in the fields. I was making beds for the fall brassicas with the Massey-Ferguson, Erinn was cultivating squash and sweet potatoes with Gus, one of our little Super A tractors, and Jonathan had just finished cultivating our newest planting of carrots with Gretta, the other Super A. We were making good progress on weed killing, which has been a challenge so far this year because of the intermittent storms.
As we finished up to come in for lunch, we noticed the quickening wing and the black clouds in the southwest — nothing new for us over the past few weeks, but the lightning and thunder were ominous against the dark sky.
The storm hit while we were eating. The wind howled across the fields, rain poured off the top of the wash station and the building next to it — and then the hail began. Dime- and penny-sized hail pelted the fields for twenty minutes before it eased up, then began again. At first, we stood in the doorway, watching open-mouthed as the icy pellets piled up in the parking lot. Finally, Andy turned away. “I can’t watch it any more,” he muttered. We got over an inch of rain in those twenty to thirty minutes, washing out newly seeded carrots and flattening young watermelon vines, turning our arugula beds into mud flats with the consistency of chocolate pudding and pooling in our normally well-drained fields.
After the lightning moved off to the east, we walked around the fields in our mudboots, marvelling at the standing water in the center field and the resilience of the tender lettuce, planted only the day before, whose growing tips stood up out of the mud. Older lettuce, particularly the tender butterhead varieties, looked like confetti. Tomato and pepper plants were blown sideways, with broken limbs dangling and young fruit studded with bruises. Squash and zucchini plants had shredded leaves and dented fruit, and melon vines were pounded into the soil, in some places broken completely off by the hailstones. Cucumbers bore white scars along their vines, like the toothmarks of some icy woodchuck spirit. The Lyman field, less than a mile away, was undamaged.
Most things here at the farm will recover from the storm. The squash and zucchini we picked on Thursday and Sunday after the hail, covered with scars that stretched as they grew, would have been frowned upon at a market stand, but were received with murmurs of understanding by shareholders. The new squash, only flowers at the time of the hail, are sizing up quickly in this week’s heat. The watermelons and tomatoes may be delayed a little as they recover, but the intensity of July’s growth is difficult to deter.
The biggest trauma of the day was probably to our farmers’ risk-taking souls — but the biggest comfort is the security of the CSA model, where those risks aren’t borne by the farmers alone. Yes, the weather still keeps us up at night — and we are constantly aware of the responsibility we have to our remarkable and supportive shareholders. It’s clear, as if we needed a reminder, that all the efforts of our hardworking farm crew could ultimately be powerless in the face of a real natural disaster. But a crisis, even a small one like this one, reminds us of the relative resiliency and flexibility of the type of farming we do, where the diversity of crops mimics that of a natural ecosystem and the support of our community means we are never completely at the mercy of that howling wind.
A couple of days after the storm, the daylily grower who rents space here at the field station called me over to look at his bed of lilies, just sending up their flower scapes. “I wait all year for this,” he said, ” and now something’s been eating my scapes! I have no idea what it could be. I’m thinking of spraying something odiferous over the whole bed to keep them away. I only get one shot at these lilies in a season, and I can’t figure out what is happening to them.”
I looked at them. The white scars up the stem of each flower did look like the gnawing of an animal. The nodding, broken blossoms were all too familiar. One shot. One flower stalk. One storm. “I think I have an idea what might have happened to these,” I said slowly, and once again, even as we shook our heads over the ferocity of the season’s weather, I was filled with gratitude.
Enjoy the battle-scarred harvest.